Before then a much-loved amateur music-and-comedy act in his native Tennessee, David Harrison Macon, known in his stage persona as Uncle Dave Macon, turned professional at the age of 50. Five years later, with the founding of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, he became the first major star of rural Southern music. By the time he died on March 22, 1952, he had seen country music transformed into a popular genre whose 19th-century roots were barely audible even as his own music remained exactly as it had been at the beginning.

The job designation "folk singer" didn't exist until Uncle Dave's last years, but that is what he was, among other things. The late Charles Wolfe, the noted historian of country's first generation, has written that Uncle Dave "preserved and transmitted more genuine folk songs than anyone in history" -- songs that would have been lost otherwise, a harrowing thought when one considers that these include "Keep My Skillet Good & Greasy," "Rock About My Saro Jane," "Way Down the Old Plank Road" and many more. Macon's eclectic repertoire encompassed as well old vaudeville tunes, hymns, novelties and at least a hundred originals. Among the last are the enduring protest songs "Wreck of the Tennessee Gravy Train" and "We Are up Against It Now."

Born in Smartt Station, Tennessee, on Oct. 7, 1870, young Dave moved with his family to Nashville in 1884, where his parents had purchased the Old Broadway Hotel. There, he was exposed to vaudeville personalities who holed up there during their time in town. Watching them, he grew fascinated with the entertainment business. The lessons he learned never left him, and after securing a banjo in 1885, he yearned for a career as a full-time professional. When the Macons moved to Readyville to run a stagecoach inn, Dave amused passengers on their stops, singing raucously, cracking jokes and generating a reputation as a uniquely boisterous character.

Marriage and family responsibilities (six sons) kept Dave from embarking on the perilous path of full-time vaudevillian, however. In 1900, he founded a freight line, with wagon and mules, between Murfreesboro and Woodbury, Tennessee, but he kept his banjo by his side and drew crowds with it along the way. At 50 he sold the company, willing to take his chances because his fame and popularity were spreading throughout the mid-South. Already cutting 78s, he was well known before he stepped onto the Opry stage. His appearances on Nashville's powerful, Opry-hosting WSM beamed his sound across the eastern half of the nation.

Dixie Dewdrop: The Uncle Dave Macon Story, the first full biography of this seminal musical figure, is an eminently readable chronicle of its subject's career ups and downs as well as the not-always happy life of his family, plagued -- like Dave himself, though he was better able to control it than some of his sons -- with alcoholism. Author Michael D. Doubler, a retired Army officer and military historian who is Macon's great grandson, is especially strong on the man's personality, of the sort for which the adjective "outsized" applies about as aptly as anywhere. Though he never met his subject, Doubler is able to draw on family lore for much of his material, along with outside sources including interviews conducted in the 1970s by Prof. Wolfe.

I imagine that a more formal scholarly biography will come along in due course, but Dixie Dewdrop will do for now. I suspect that future chronicles will not quarrel much with Doubler's portrayal of a hugely gregarious, relentlessly energetic, kind-hearted man who apparently concealed no deep secrets and tormenting demons.

Doubler treats David Macon the private man and Uncle Dave Macon the public one (aka "Dixie Dewdrop") as essentially the same person. To him, singing, yarn-spinning and joke-making seemed as essential as breathing. Uncle Dave was never, it appears, not in on the joke, and he was sui generis. His friend Roy Acuff declared that in the entertainment realm no one "was more individual. ... He seemed to copy nobody." On stage he engaged, Doubler writes, in "wild facial expressions, exaggerated vocal imitations, sudden shouts, yodeling, tongue rattles, lip smacking, comical mispronunciations of certain words, the repeated doffing of his hat, and an endless offering of other physical antics."

Unfortunately, very little of this is preserved on film. Fortunately, between 1924 and 1938 Macon, occasionally accompanied by the likes of fiddler Sid Harkreader and guitarist Sam McGee, recorded dozens of songs and comedy routines that preserve everything but the visible part of the performances. These records, widely reissued with the revival of interest in old-time music, are still edifying and enjoyable, the equal of just about any homegrown music from that fabled era.

Much of this book, as befits the man himself, is gleefully funny. Here's an example:

After playing in Asheville, North Carolina, Uncle Dave, Curly Fox, and Fox's band elected to head for Knoxville. Doubler tells the rest of the story: "The steep, challenging descent from the Smoky Mountains occurred at night, and ... a sudden, powerful storm hit ... as the car careened through a continuous series of sharp, hairpin turns. Not far into the descent, all the car's occupants realized they were in a treacherous situation. ... Suddenly, Uncle Dave shouted from the back seat: 'Lord, if you just get me off this mountain safe, I swear, I'll never touch another drop of whiskey!' The storm soon eased, and before long, the car made it to more level ground. A few minutes later, a calmer voice was heard from the back seat. 'Boys, hand me my grip,' Uncle Dave requested, 'I've got to have a nip to calm my nerves.'"